2

Bloomsbury

What were the anti-war feelings chiefly expressed outside ‘organised’ protest and not under political or religious banners – those attitudes which form the raison d’être for this study? As the Great War becomes more distant in time, certain actions and individuals become greyer and more obscure whilst others seem to become clearer and imbued with a dash of colour amid the sepia. One thinks particularly of the so-called Bloomsbury Group.1 Any overview of ‘alter- native’ attitudes to the war must consider the responses of Bloomsbury to the shadows of doubt and uncertainty thrown across page and canvas by the con- flict. Despite their notoriety, the reactions of the Bloomsbury individuals are important both in their own right and as a mirror to the similar reactions of obscurer individuals from differing circumstances and backgrounds. In the origins of Bloomsbury – well known as one of the foremost cultural groups of the late Victorian and Edwardian periods – is to be found the moral and aesthetic core for some of the most significant humanistic reactions to the war. The small circle of Cambridge undergraduates whose mutual appreciation of the thoughts and teachings of the academic and philosopher G.E. Moore led them to form lasting friendships, became the kernel of what would become labelled ‘the Bloomsbury Group’. It was, as one academic described, ‘a nucleus from which civilisation has spread outwards’.2 This rippling effect, though tem- porarily dammed by the keenly-felt constrictions of the war, would continue to flow outwards through the twentieth century, inspiring, as is well known, much analysis and interpretation along the way. The emotions of Bloomsbury mirrored to a large extent those of its mentors. For one of the ‘fathers’ of Bloomsbury, the older Cambridge academic and humanist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson,3 the coming of war was disastrous. For him, as Bloomsbury patroness Lady Ottoline Morrell noted in 1916, the war came, ‘like a battering ram, bruising him and knocking him permanently over … he felt the Nation’s calamities more poignantly and devastatingly than any private calamity of his own’.4 Dickinson had himself referred to the time (in August 1914) when the war ‘burst upon the world’ in his published essay ‘The Basis of a Permanent Peace’. Dickinson wrote that the effect of the war upon those who had not followed foreign affairs, and, by implication, were

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busy with their own lives, was one of incredulity followed by a feeling that it must never happen again. However, peaceful intentions then became ‘submerged’ beneath hopes of victory and fears of defeat. During the waging of the war, ‘the purpose of it is in danger of being forgotten’, he warned, pointing out that soldiers did not possess normal freedoms of choice; ‘Those at the front have not the opportunity to consider the conditions of such a peace’. Hence, he con- cluded, it was the business of those at home to do so.5 Dickinson had gone up to Cambridge in 1881 from Charterhouse and had come, via a ‘Shelleyan religion of humanity’, into the orbit of the academic and thinker J.E. McTaggart and his philosophy of loving personal relationships linked to an absolute theoretical truth. Dickinson, though an atheist, had come from a background of Christian Socialism and, in common with much of the resultant Bloomsbury attitude toward the Great War, ‘the dissent which they articulated shared certain Christian and Socialist presuppositions, but neither Christianity nor Socialism was the substance of their pacifism’.6 From an early age, ‘his desire to serve humanity was strong’, E.M. Forster declared in his 1934 biogra- phy of Dickinson, though pointing out, in a statement tinged with Forster’s own post-war regret, that ‘love of humanity’ did not now (in the 1930s) carry with it the same promise that it had done in the previous century. In 1887, three years after obtaining a First in Classics, Dickinson was elected to a Fellowship at King’s College, his official subject being Political Science in which he lectured from 1896 to 1920. With the dawn of a new century the concerns of the wider world now occu- pied more of Dickinson’s time: for example, his involvement in the founding of the journal Independent Review in 1903 to help combat a policy of aggressive imperialism. As Forster put it, Dickinson’s philosophy was that, ‘We must first get the house straight then fill it with beautiful things … though he [Dickinson] was sensible enough to know that unless we have a certain amount of beautiful things lying about we shall not think it worth while to get the house straight’.7 Dickinson never lost his appreciation of beauty, especially that of the country- side of England. As he wrote in his 1901 volume Letters from John Chinaman and other Essays, ‘To feel, and in order to feel to express, or at least to under- stand the expression of all that is lovely in Nature, of all that is poignant and sensitive in man is to us in itself a sufficient end’.8 Dickinson’s The Meaning of Good of 1901 (some of which was written whilst staying with artist and Bloomsbury ‘member’ Roger Fry) had been largely inspired by the ethics of Dickinson’s rejected Christian background and the philosophy of McTaggart, though Dickinson was ultimately more affected by G.E. Moore’s Principia Ethica, which appeared in 1903. Dickinson was fifty-two in 1914 and following the outbreak of war he, like Bertrand Russell (see Chapter 3), wrote numerous articles on the war. He and Russell both joined the Union of Democratic Control and the No Conscription Fellowship, with Dickinson becoming President of the Cambridge branch of

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the UDC. In his writings, Dickinson apportioned blame to no single country for the conflict; rather, he argued, it was the fault of the secret diplomacy of the international diplomatic system, a system which, according to Dickinson, had to be altered by the implementation of some form of general alliance in order to prevent future conflicts from escalating. He became a leading figure in the League of Nations Society and grew, like Russell, impatient with the UDC which did not accept the wider concept of a league as an integral part of its policy. Both Dickinson and Russell, according to the academic M.R. Pollock, shared the ‘uncompromising individualism’ of the conscientious objectors (whom they both supported in the Liberal press) and were engaged upon a crusade for moral principles, their ideals being those of the Cambridge Apostles: beauty, friend- ship, love, reason, individualism and private conscience. ‘Passion is needed’, wrote Dickinson in the Nation, ‘for the real things, for good instead of evil, for truth instead of lies, for love instead of hate. To turn it into those channels, the friends of reason are always working’.9 This focus on the channelling of human energies had much in common with the ideas of Bertrand Russell. Dickinson’s pacifism, like that of Russell’s, ‘was couched primarily in rational and ethical terms rather than in political or economic terms’,10 as Forster later pointed out. Though Dickinson perhaps placed too much faith in human rationality and tended, unlike Russell, to ignore the ‘primitive and pre-logical’ element that survived in ‘civilised’ modern man, both men agreed that the role of the pacifist was ‘to create life’ and that war was the enemy of ‘the passion of love, the perception of beauty, the contemplation of truth’. During war, man’s sensibili- ties were affected by a ‘blind intoxication’, and he became divorced from a peacetime existence of ‘impassioned reason’.11 Pacifists supported the concept of ‘a free friendship where men co-operate or compete as independent individu- als not as passive creatures of a man movement … to be swept away on a torrent of corporate passion is to them not an ideal at all. On the contrary, it is the negation of all they value’.12 Just as Russell’s later dismissal from Trinity College (see Chapter 3) seemed to ‘snap one’s last link with Cambridge’, as Dickinson put it in a letter to his fellow academic, the war’s effect had brought to Dickinson’s Cambridge exist- ence what he later described as a ‘sense of alienation from common opinion’ due to his own attitude and those of others towards him, in particular the patriotic McTaggart. Most of his former pupils were serving at the front, and his classes were now full of women. E.M. Forster proclaimed that Dickinson’s ‘greatest disillusionment’ was with the attitudes of the leading academic insti- tutions; ‘those who should have been the leaders followed the crowd down a steep place’ and the students, whom he expected to ‘keep the light of truth burning in a storm’, Dickinson found to be ‘blindly patriotic’, false or plain fearful when confronted with the tide of public opinion. ‘All discussion, all pursuit of truth ceased in a moment’, Dickinson later recalled, ‘To win the war or to hide safely among the winners became the only preoccupation. Abroad

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was heard only the sound of guns, at home only the ceaseless patter of a propa- ganda utterly indifferent to truth.’13 The war affected Dickinson profoundly; he often referred to a ‘gulf’ between his remembered pre-war life and existence against the backdrop of war. In an article entitled ‘The Holy War’, written for the Nation, he highlighted, ‘the gulf between nature, the past, all beautiful true and gracious things and beliefs, and this black horror of inconceivability’.14 In a letter of November 1914, included by Forster in his biography, Dickinson wrote sadly that, ‘if one’s whole life has been given up trying to establish reason and suddenly the gulf opens and one finds that world is ruled by force and wishes to be so, one feels forlorn indeed and more than forlorn’.15 Although he turned his back on his former academic world, shutting himself up in his rooms, as he later described, with only his books, lamp and flickering fire, in reality Dickinson continued to battle, in Forster’s words, for ‘the spirit of reason’. In addition to his work with the Bryce Group,16 the Society for a Durable Peace and the League of Nations Society (later the League of Nations Union), articles, pamphlets and publications poured out at a rate only perhaps matched by Russell.17 He wrote mainly for the readership of the Manchester Guardian, the Nation, the Cambridge Magazine, War and Peace (later the In- ternational Review) as well as (again in common with Russell) for several jour- nals in the United States. Forster describes him as being driven by his sense of moral earnestness and the drive of his intellect, an intellect which, ‘forbade him to seek the solace either or patriotism, anti-patriotism or religion’. He was ‘con- demned’ to follow this intellect, ‘in a world which had become emotional’. In 1917, Dickinson cemented his alliance with Bloombury by visiting Leonard and Virginia Woolf. Virginia, worried at his state, described him thus: ‘This war seems to possess him to leave little over. In fact he looked shrunk and worn’.18 Despite resigning his lectureship in 1920, disillusioned and worn out by his experiences during the war, Dickinson continued his literary campaign against conflict in the following years, writing in 1923 that ‘War, it is often said by its apologists, is not the greatest of evils. To me, on the contrary, it appears to be precisely that, if only because, in addition to its own evil, it includes and brings with it others.’ In addition, while citing personal accounts of ‘pure affection’, comradeship and a sense of identity at the front as ‘records of genuine experience which it is no part of my case to belittle or deny’, he maintained that both the writers and readers of such accounts, ‘would not suppose that such experi- ences justify war. They are only something to be set against its evils’, it being to Dickinson’s mind ‘a plain truth’ that war and civilisation remained ‘incompat- ible’.19 The war shattered Dickinson’s pre-war optimism; the ‘gulf’ that he described having opened up between the old world and the new was too great to bridge. The conflict also dulled the optimism of the younger generation (the ‘core’ of

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Bloomsbury) that, like Dickinson himself, had passed through Cambridge and shared many of the values that Dickinson held dear, values that derived from the university’s apostolic notions of an individual’s right to intellectual integ- rity, truth and the pursuit of love, friendship and beauty. When the war came, wrote one commentator:

The Cambridge–Bloomsbury vision of civilisation progressing triumphantly towards a new golden age receded before the spectre of a civilisation hastening towards its own ruin. The confident expectation that Cambridge values would spread outward was belied by a world tragedy which appeared to threaten the very survival of these values.20

However, this fear was not immediately apparent during the final days of peace. There was generally no conception of the extent to which the conflict would threaten the civilised values that Bloomsbury held so dear. Lady Ottoline Morrell described her Bloomsbury friends descending en masse on her London home at the end of July 1914, ‘all of them desperately jingo, longing to rush into the war at once’. She herself did not need actual experience of war to convince her of its wrongness. ‘It seems absolute madness to me’, she wrote to Bertrand Russell, adding that, ‘They attacked Philip [her husband and an MP] violently because he was in favour of keeping out of it. They seem to utterly ignore the appalling horrors of war. The ruin and suffering and devastation of it.’21 In time her friends began to match Lady Ottoline’s reaction; ‘It was the progress of the war itself that changed attitudes’, states Robert Skidelsky, the biographer of John Maynard Keynes – one of the first of Bloomsbury to find their initial view of the war altered but who, due to his association with the government via his work for the Treasury, was viewed by his friends as perhaps not sufficiently anti-war. However, as early as November 1914, Lady Ottoline recorded that:

Duncan Grant brought Keynes last night who says he has only begun to realise the horror of the war during the last two weeks and he was evidently miserable and feeling it intensely and was ever so nice – quite different to what he was. He said his soul seems to have been laid bare to it and that before he had a cataract over it.22

Quentin Bell, the nephew of Virginia Woolf, stated in his lecture ‘Recollec- tions and Reflections on Maynard Keynes’ that although Keynes was prepared, in metaphorical terms to shoulder a musket, he and Bloomsbury were in fact united during the war, ‘by a determination to keep their heads in the mael- strom; whatever else they might do they would not accept the prevailing reli- gion of hatred’.23 Although Bell describes Keynes as ‘morally committed’ to the war because of his work for the War Office, he also states that Keynes was ‘en- tirely in sympathy’ with his friends, a point borne out by Ottoline Morrell’s ob- servation of November 1914. It seemed that Keynes was as deeply affected as his

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friends (and perhaps more so) by the war’s pressure on their sense of self. This was not surprising given Keynes’ shared Apostolic background and beliefs. Keynes described the early influence of G.E. Moore on himself as having been, ‘exciting, exhilarating, the beginning of a renaissance, the opening of a new heaven on a new earth’. He and his friends were ‘the forerunners of a new dispensation’, especially since they were able, as Keynes described, to accept Moore’s ‘religion’ and discard the ‘morals’ contained in Moore’s chapter in Principia Ethica on ‘Ethics in Relation to Conduct’. Keynes described himself and his friends as being in one sense ‘immoralists’ in that they repudiated con- ventional wisdom and morality and recognised no moral obligation on them to conform or obey; ‘Before heaven we claimed to be our own judge in our own case’.24 While being concerned with ‘the salvation of our own souls’ through the practice of passionate contemplation of love, truth and beauty and enjoy- ment of aesthetic experience, this philosophy could be extended to cover whole societies: ‘the supreme value of the civilised individuals, whose pluralisation, as more and more civilised individuals, was itself the only acceptable social form’.25 It was the hope contained in this concept of society that the Great War began to stifle. Keynes’ initial reaction to the war was one of surprise and, as we have seen, it took a while for its full impact to sink in. Hence in August 1914 he had written to his father that, ‘I am only gloomy in fits and starts’ and that he found that he was ‘beginning to get very well used to the situation’.26 By the time he was taken by Duncan Grant to visit Lady Ottoline three months later, however, he was writing to Lytton Strachey from Cambridge that he was, ‘absolutely and completely desolated. It is utterly unbearable to see day by day the youths go- ing away, first to boredom and discomfort, and then to slaughter.’27 He pointed to the fact that five undergraduates of King’s College had already been killed. As the casualties mounted, so did the tension within Keynes’ increasingly troubled mind. On the one hand was his concern for his friends – on the other, his role as an economist. The public servant in him believed that the war would soon be over and kept him too busy to get involved in organisations such as the Union of Democratic Control, whereas the humanistic element within him attempted to dissuade both his brother Geoffrey and his Hungarian friend Ferenc Bekassy from enlisting – he was unsuccessful in both cases. As friends and undergraduates failed to return from the front, Keynes admit- ted to Duncan Grant that he found his subconscious feelings were muted and ‘deeply depressed’ by the pressure of the war and that he longed for the war to be over ‘on almost any terms’. In April 1915, at the news of the deaths of Rupert Brooke and two more King’s undergraduates, he described the war to Grant, as ‘a nightmare to be stopt [sic] anyhow’, praying that, ‘May no other generation live under the cloud we live under’. At this point, Keynes was a busy government official with access to the Prime Minister in matters related to supplies and prices of foodstuffs. By May 1915, Keynes was deeply involved in

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the overall financial direction of the war as part of the Treasury’s No. 1 Divi- sion. One side of him was attempting, unsuccessfully, to conceal the other; as Bertrand Russell commented to Lady Ottoline, he was ‘using his intellect to hide the torment in his soul’.28 One of his biographers has pointed out: Keynes’ life was balanced between two sets of moral claims. His duty as an indi- vidual was to achieve good states of mind for himself and for those he was directly concerned with; his duty as a citizen was to help achieve a happy state of affairs for society. The two claims he thought of as logically independent of each other. He attached greater priority to the first than to the second, except when he thought the state was in danger.29 At no time was this more true than when embodied in his response to the public and personal claims to the Great War. Keynes became increasingly busy at the Treasury throughout the war, caus- ing his friends, and in particular Virginia Woolf, to worry that he would be ‘lost’ to humanity. However, despite a whirl of conferences, parties and being made Companion of the Bath (Third Class) in 1917, Keynes still spent week- ends at the Charleston farmhouse of Bloomsbury artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. In addition, Keynes supported both Grant and his friend David Garnett in their claims for exemption from military service. Indeed, Keynes succeeded in obtaining commissions for Grant and other artists via Lord Beaverbrook, the Minister of Information, under that Ministry’s War Artists Scheme. More pro- saically, Keynes also provided Garnett with financial help for his bee-keeping. On the more crucial issue of his own attitude to military service, Keynes did not make use of his certificate of exemption from military service on grounds of work of national importance supplied by Sir Thomas Heath, joint Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, in February 1916. Instead, he wrote out an applica- tion to the Holborn local tribunal for exemption on grounds of conscientious objection. In it, he stated that: I have a conscientious objection to surrendering my liberty of judgement … My objection to submit to authority in this matter is truly conscientious. I am not pre- pared on such an issue as this to surrender my right of decision, as to what is or is not my duty, to any other person, and I should think it morally wrong to do so.30 Although there is no certainty that this actual statement was sent to the Holborn tribunal, the existence of a summons from the Clerk of the Tribunal for 28 March 1916 and a reply from Keynes stating that he was too busy at the Trea- sury to attend this date provide proof that Keynes must have made an initial application for exemption to the local authorities. Keynes never appeared before the tribunal because the Treasury exempted him above his head, firstly for a six-month period and then later, in August 1916, with no time limit attached. However, Keynes’ non-appearance at his exemption hearing coupled to the fact that he did not attempt to withdraw his application (despite the Treasury exemption) or try to get the date of the hearing

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changed (which would have been relatively simple, given his position within the Government) all point to the clear possibility, as Robert Skidelsky has pointed out, that Keynes was thinking of resigning from the Treasury over the conduct and continuance of the war and, in particular, the issue of conscription. Crucially, he applied for exemption on 23 February 1916, although by the date of the proposed hearing in late March he had decided to remain with the Government. This gave him no pleasure. ‘I work for a government I despise for ends I think criminal’,31 he wrote to Duncan Grant during the final year of the war, though he derived a ‘moral justification’, in the words of his biographer, in staying put at the Treasury and using his position to help friends such as Grant, David Garnett, Gerald Shove and others with their applications for exemption on grounds of conscience. The irony of this situation lay in the fact that his friends, particularly Garnett and Lytton Strachey, had pressured him to stop working for the Government and hence the war effort. Yet he was able to be of most practical help ‘from within’ and, in any case, ‘he was as far from surren- dering his conscience even to his friends as from surrendering it to the dictates of the state’.32 An example of Keynes working from within was his influence on the original Military Service Bill. As Vanessa Bell reported to Roger Fry in early January 1916: Maynard came for the weekend … He held out hopes of a conscience clause. The bill had first been drafted without one then Reginald McKenna [the Chancellor of the Exchequer] put one in but Maynard thought that it would only do for Quakers and made him change it.33 To a certain extent, Keynes also remained at the Treasury in the hope and expectation that the war would soon be over, particularly after President Wilson’s envoys visited Britain in early 1916 and the President’s appeal of January 1917 for a negotiated peace. This was soon followed by the Russian Revolution and eventual withdrawal of that nation from the conflict. However, peace did not come as expected, and Keynes’ pessimism took over once more and, ‘reached its peak at the end of 1917 and continued until the end of the war’,34 spilling over into his account of the peace negotiations contained within The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919). As he wrote to his mother in April 1918: Politics and war are just as depressing or even more so than they seem to be. If this Government were to beat the Germans, I should lose all faith for the future in the efficacy of intellectual processes; but there doesn’t seem much risk of it. Everything is always decided for some reason other than the real merits of the case in the sphere with which I have contact. And I have no doubt that it is just the same with every- thing else.35 Lytton Strachey, sometimes described as Bloomsbury’s most prominent con- scientious objector, famously placed a catty note on Keynes’ dinner plate in February 1916 (significantly, perhaps, a week before Keynes applied for exemption from military service on grounds of conscience) which read, ‘Dear

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Maynard, Why are you still at the Treasury? yours, Lytton’. Strachey shared Keynes’ early Apostolistic background and admiration for G.E. Moore and was perhaps more responsive from the first to the changing circumstances of a nation at war and his part in it. Virginia Woolf noted that, ‘He is one of the most supple of our friends … the person whose mind seems softest to impres- sions, least starched by any formality or impediment’.36 As early as mid-August 1914, Strachey wrote to his brother James that: I think it’s very important that people should be stirred up about Peace … Any straw seems worth clutching at when such things are at stake. I’m sure the essential thing is to institute a Stop the War party in the Cabinet, backed by public opinion. It’s no good wasting energies over blaming E. Grey [the Foreign Secretary] … I haven’t seen anyone who hasn’t agreed in the main lines eg. that we should take nothing for ourselves and insist on ending it at the earliest possible moment. But perhaps by now there has been a German victory.37 He wisely suggested that appearing pro-German at the present time would have no beneficial effect, and the optimum position to adopt was anti-German and pro-peace. Strachey thus exhibited knowledge, like Vanessa Bell, as discussed in Chap- ter 6, of the practical side of protest and an awareness of the plausibility of public opinion. As he wrote to his friend Dorothy Bussy a few days later: So far as I can make out there isn’t the slightest enthusiasm for the war. I think the public are partly feeling simple horror and partly that it’s a dreadful necessity. But I think there will be a change when the casualties begin – both in the direction of greater hostility to the Germans and also more active disgust at the whole thing. Though of course a great deal will depend on the actual turn of events. On the Foreign Secretary, Grey and the political dimension Strachey commented, ‘It’s like a puppet show, with the poor little official dolls dancing and squeaking their official phrases, while the strings are being pulled by some devilish Unseen Power. One naturally wants to blame somebody – the Kaiser for choice – but the tragic irony, it seems to me, really is that everyone was helpless’. He con- cluded that ‘The real horror is that Europe is not yet half civilised’,38 and ech- oed in his thoughts Bertrand Russell’s public theories of the destructive emotions of mankind being allowed to run amok in a European situation that Russell, Strachey and the rest of Bloomsbury recognised as a return to barbarism. Inter- national culture that had bound mankind together was now threatened; when an outraged James Strachey pointed out to his brother the plans to leave Ger- man composers out of the Promenade Concerts and his letters of protest to the manager and press on the subject, Lytton replied, ‘Let us leave this planet – hurriedly, hurriedly’.39 He commented how he could now understand how people’s personal feelings could be overcome by popular emotion. ‘And at any rate one would not have to think any more’,40 he concluded, noting the per- ceived deadening effect of an existence under military control.

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While his brother James was planning to produce a pamphlet entitled ‘Why I shall not Join Lord Kitchener’s Army – By a Fellow of Trinity’, which he believed would have ‘immense sale’ in intellectual circles, Strachey was equally practical, knitting mufflers for soldiers, learning German and considering the position of intellectuals in the war, concluding that ‘We’re all far too weak physically to be of any use at all. If we weren’t we’d still be too intelligent to be thrown away in some really not essential expedition.’41 The natural place for intellectuals, thought Strachey – if they must be incorporated into the war-state – was, perhaps not surprisingly, in the National Reserve, this idea being partly prompted by the fact that he had just heard of his friend Duncan Grant’s plans to join that body. Another option was for intellectuals to leave the country, either for the United States or, as Strachey stated in a later letter, for France, where the waters of conscience were (in September 1914) less muddied, and the intellectual could provide solid help in preventing that country’s demise (this being the primary goal of enlisting; Strachey stated that he didn’t care about a British victory, ‘apart from personal questions’). Whatever option one chose, it was no use the intellectual pretending that he was not ‘a special case’ and, at the end of all things, ‘one must resist if it comes to a push’.42 Strachey was appalled by the treatment of civilians of German extraction, and the Byronic death of handsome poet Rupert Brooke in the spring of 1915 seemed to symbolise the ‘muddle and futility’ of fate. Life under war had be- come merely a ‘confused tale’ and one that for some was ‘just beginning and then broken off for no reason, and for ever’. In a letter to his friend Francis Birrell in August 1915, he described himself as resembling a desert cactus, dried- up and solitary, ‘alone – desolate and destitute – in a country of overhanging thunder clouds and heavy emptiness’.43 As Strachey’s biographer Michael Holroyd has stated, ‘He [Strachey] saw everything in terms of the individual and felt that he was growing increasingly sensitive’.44 During the same month as his confession to Birrell, Strachey was approached by a schoolmaster at ‘The Lacket’, his country home near Marlborough, and, to his surprise, handed a Registration paper: As a method of getting hold of shirkers it seems to me strangely inefficient. Who on earth is ‘skilled in any work other than that in which he is engaged?’ Most strange! Perhaps I might put ‘addressing envelopes’ – but I can’t think of anything else, ex- cept buggery, and I’m not very skilful at that … At any rate, all one can do is put ‘no’ and then I suppose they mean to worry one with security agents.45 The following month, perhaps realising that the war had discovered him even at his present rural location, Strachey moved back to London, which was scarcely an improvement. He described the capital thus: The fog has descended in force and the shadow of Death reigns … very nearly all the lights were out, which combined with the fog, produced complete darkness. In the streets of Soho one might have been on a Yorkshire moor for all one could see to the

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contrary. How the human spirit manages to flicker even as faintly as it does is a mystery … it is solid, damp and heavy with the depression of war.46 After a ‘dreary’ Christmas spent at Lady Ottoline’s often freezing Garsington Manor, the introduction of the Conscription Bill after months of speculation served to lift Strachey out of his malaise, and January 1916 found him energised, exclaiming to his brother James, ‘isn’t it still possible that something should be done? Surely there ought to be a continual stream of leaflets and pamphlets. Also, if possible, meetings all over the country and signatures collected against the Bill.’47 Strachey joined the NCF and the National Council Against Con- scription, the offices of which were now a frequent haunt of his brother, who had parted journalistic ways with the largely ‘pro-war’ Spectator. Strachey helped to draft ‘Leaflet No. 3’, which criticised the government for its conscription policy in that this would help to transform Britain into a police state (rather in the same vein as Bertrand Russell’s later article which led to his personal pros- ecution, discussed in Chapter 3). The leaflet was suppressed by H.W. Massingham at the Nation but not before 500,000 copies had been distributed and it had been quoted in the Morning Post. In his article for the journal War and Peace entitled ‘The Claims of Patriotism’, Strachey called for common sense and a little scepticism while warning that, ‘Amid the bigotry and hysteria of war, people on both sides too easily relinquish their individuality and with it their humanity’.48 This was also the time of Strachey’s criticism of Keynes for working for a government that was seeking more and more to meet militarism with milita- rism. Both Strachey and his brother considered their futures under the new Military Service Act; James Strachey sent in his application for exemption early on. ‘I went in only for conscience’, he wrote, ‘just said I thought the war wrong and wouldn’t do anything of any kind to help in it and added “as evidence that I genuinely hold this view” the fact of my leaving the Spec.[Spectator]’. The outlook was not promising; ‘I now think that all is lost’, continued James Strachey: it looks to me as thought the Tribunals were absolutely refusing (illegally?) to ex- empt anyone on medical grounds. That’s to say they prefer to leave the decision to the military authorities. In that case, you’d be called up and examined after you’d been ‘deemed’. This complicates things extremely, especially in connection with con- science.49 James advised his brother to prepare some kind of statement, which Lytton did.50 Lytton replied that, although he had many feelings against joining the army that were not of a conscientious nature, even if he found himself doing clerical work in the lowly Class IVb he would feel this expense of energy to- wards the war to be wrong and was prepared, as he told his brother, to go to prison rather than do work of even that sort. Both brothers recognised that the Military Service Act did not provide for exemption on grounds of objection to the specifics of the current war, but only to war in general. The words of the Act

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gave no guidance as to the motive of the objection to service, ‘whether it’s due to a general regard for the sanctity of human life, or to more particular objec- tions to combatant service at the present moment – so long as the motive is conscientious. That word gives opportunities for endless argument’.51 This and the ‘intense’ nervous strain of waiting for a tribunal was all part of the ‘appall- ing and senseless misery’ generated by the Act. James Strachey’s solution was to highlight one’s objection to the present war and one’s pro-Germanism, which he thought would infuriate the tribunals to such an extent that they would immediately reject those individuals for inclusion within the ranks of the military. His brother, who wrote to Virginia Woolf that he couldn’t ‘lie still’ under the threat of the ‘horrors of the outer world’ (i.e. the tribunals) beginning to assert themselves, now placed his hope in ‘the extremity of extremism’ and found a new regard for Clifford Allen and the activities of the NCF in their refusal to compromise (‘Britain’s One Hope’, as he described them to Vanessa Bell). He felt that once conscientious objectors placed themselves in occupations found for them by the authorities, ‘they are done for’. Lytton Strachey himself appeared as a claimant for exemption before a local Advisory Commitee (which would recommend a course of action to the tribu- nal) on 2 March 1916, at which he stated his conscientious objection was not based on religious grounds, but upon ‘moral considerations’ and although he could not say that all wars were wrong, his objection, he stated, was directed ‘not simply against the present war’. He concluded that he would not act against his personal convictions, ‘whatever the consequences may be’. When he finally appeared before the Hampstead Tribunal, with MP Philip Morrell as his char- acter witness, his application for exemption was adjourned pending a medical which took place a few days later and resulted in him being rejected for any form of military service. However, Strachey was unsatisfied with the tribunal’s decision to grant him exemption from combatant service only and not the absolute exemption that he requested. He drafted an appeal statement which he sent to his brother and which read, ‘Since my objection … rested upon an objection to taking any part, direct or indirect, in the present war, the only exemption which could reason- ably have been granted was an absolute one’. His objection also rested on the fact that the tribunal had provided him with no reason for its decision and that it had refused to let him question the Military Representative, whose objection to Strachey’s claim was that it was not a ‘conscientious’ nature within the mean- ing of the Act. Strachey pointed out that the tribunal, in granting him partial exemption, had recognised that his claim was a ‘conscientious’ one and hence it had been ‘unreasonable’ of the tribunal, ‘to withhold from me the only form of exemption which would appropriately meet my objection’.52 Although he was now technically ‘safe’ from the military, Strachey was pre- pared to help agitate for better treatment of conscientious objectors, if a deputation to the Prime Minister (organised by the Morrells and including the

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Bishop of Oxford) failed to produce any improvement in the situation. In the meantime, in addition to visiting the Woolfs and braving Garsington once again, he settled back into work on his Eminent Victorians after his nerve-wracking brush with the authorities. However, the authorities were not to leave him in peace; in July 1916 he received a letter from the War Office stating that he had to present himself for another medical inspection before 30 September, and he took great exception to the fact that the order described him as, ‘a man who offered himself for enlistment and was rejected since August 1915’. In the early summer of 1917 Strachey had to re-establish his case for conscientious objec- tion. Philip Morrell was not allowed to testify, and a counsel was hired to rep- resent him. A decision based upon an objection on grounds of conscience was adjourned pending yet another medical; this time Strachey was graded C4, placed in the reserve and ordered to re-appear every six months for further examina- tions unless he continued with his specifically ‘conscientious’ objection. On this occasion, with an apparently more serious chance of call-up, he was inclined ‘to letting sleeping dogs lie’. During the autumn of 1917, with work on Eminent Victorians almost com- pleted and the numbers of German air-raids on London growing in number (‘the horrors steadily increase’, he wrote to Clive Bell),53 Strachey and his com- panion, the artist Dora Carrington, moved to ‘The Mill House’ at Tidmarsh in Berkshire. He was restless with the uncertainty of the war and had written to his brother that, ‘I wake up in the night and feel civilisation rocking’, while at the same time had commented to Carrington that, ‘the slowness of things is tiresome. The excitement seems to come in wads, with spaces of nothingness in between – no nice orderly crescendos. However, it’s something to be able to reflect upon the excitements of the past during the nothingness of the present.’54 He tried to keep the war at a distance by correcting the proofs for his book and writing reviews and articles for the journal War and Peace attacking the ‘theol- ogy of militarism’. However, the war constantly intruded upon his life. In March 1918 he was summoned for yet another medical examination, though on this occasion it was conducted by civil rather than military authorities, and he was declared permanently unfit for all forms of military service. During the previous month he had attended Bertand Russell’s trial at Bow Street magistrates’ Court (see Chapter 3), the proceedings of which he described to Lady Ottoline as, ‘unjust, gross and generally wicked and disgusting … It makes one abandon hope that such monstrosities should occur, openly, and be accepted by very nearly every- body as a matter of course’. Strachey and his brother stepped out of the court, ‘with our teeth chattering in fury’.55 Eminent Victorians was finally published in May 1918 and from then on Stachey’s literary star was in the ascendant. However, at times when there were few distractions, the war still impinged upon his thoughts. In the final months of the conflict and with Carrington on holiday in Scotland, he wrote to her

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that, ‘The worst of it is, as one sits in solitude, the war surges up and adds to one’s depression – useless, quite useless to think of it, but one can’t help it at times.’56 Yet, throughout the war, he never quite gave up hope completely. He was able to employ his creative gifts and his intelligence in a practical way as weapons to disarm the stultifying effects of the conflict with a success that sometimes caught him unawares. As he commented to Lady Ottoline, ‘At mo- ments, I’m quite surprised how, with all these horrors around one, one goes on living as one does – and one even manages to execute an occasional pirouette on the edge of the precipice!’57 Strachey’s war-life was intimately bound up with those of his friends to whom he was always ready to offer help and advice; the month of the long-awaited publication of Eminent Victorians found him warning Duncan Grant (who had been offered a job as an official War Artist) that the Central Tribunal could easily overturn their original decision and announce, ‘“If his conscience allows him to commemorate the war by his painting, why shouldn’t it allow him to take part in it? We will therefore withdraw our exemption.” They’re such beasts…’58 However, as we have seen, Strachey’s friends did not all follow the same course of response, even if a similar philosophy of moral and aesthetic values linked and supported them all. Some, such as Clive Bell and Duncan Grant, as Ottoline Morrell noted with alarm, thought of enlisting in the early days of the war. David Garnett and Francis Birrell went to France as part of the Friends War Victims Relief Mission. However, when Duncan Grant was later deported as a ‘pacifist anarchist’59 while merely attempting to design costumes and scenery for a production of the opera Pelleas et Melisande in Paris, Garnett found that his enthusiasm had waned dramatically, writing to Strachey that: The whole business has shattered my vitality … Really it is awful being anywhere nowadays. I cannot earn a living anywhere without killing or being killed. I have much more sympathy than ever before with those Christians whose only profession in Rome was being thrown to lions.60 Garnett later recalled that, from the commencement of hostilities, ‘I had had thoughts of enlisting – not from patriotic motives, but because I felt that the war was a great human experience which I ought not to miss’,61 and his work for the Mission was his method of fulfilling this common linking motivation – the need for experience. Even Leonard Woolf later admitted that if he had not been married or had not had to care for his wife during her periods of mental illness, ‘I should have joined up, because, though I hated the war, I felt and still feel an irresistible desire to experience everything’.62 As with others, Garnett’s experience turned his thoughts against war. He had observed the displaced and bitter people of France and how the country itself was being ‘bled white’. As discussed in Chapter 4 in the case of Siegfried Sassoon, Garnett, through his experience in France, came to see that Government and military policies were misplaced and resulted only in the suffering of innocents, which made him full of ‘contempt and hatred for all systems of Government and Tyranny’, as he

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explained to Lytton Strachey. A negotiated peace was essential if European civilisation (and civilised values) was to be saved from ruin. Hence his decision to take no further part in the war effort. ‘I believed it was wrong to delegate one’s right of private judgement and therefore it was impossible for me to be a solider’, Garnett wrote in his memoirs.63 Like Lytton Strachey, Garnett had found that it was impossible not to ‘brood continually’ on the war. Garnett and Duncan Grant became fruit-farmers in the Suffolk countryside following their eventual exemption from military service by the tribunal system. Just as Garnett had considered and tested his options until he arrived by experience at the correct one, Grant’s response was also based initially on a need for experience, although he eventually took a more instinctive route and found, together with his companion and fellow artist Vanessa Bell, that the best way to face the war was simply to continue painting. As Bell described their philosophy to Lytton Strachey, ‘it seems the only thing to enjoy the present and the only way of cheating one’s fate’.64 During the first weeks of war, Grant had been buoyed with an optimism that never fully left him, while at the same time appreciating the ‘horrors’ contained in the necessity for ‘altering one’s bearing’, as he commented to Strachey in the first week of September 1914 (as he was considering joining the Reserve): I feel sure that one ought to give way to depression. But it’s jolly difficult. I don’t mean that one ought not to think that war was inevitable or wrong or the countless things that Bertie [Russell] or Maynard [Keynes] may think – so be depressed – but that one ought to plunge into the horror … and then one rises to the surface cheer- ful.65 Grant relied on his painting, personal relationships and friends in high places to sustain him; Keynes brought his official weight to bear at tribunals; Clive Bell’s father’s position as a Lord High Sheriff warded off a threatened ‘spy search’ in May 1915, and in June of the following year Lytton Strachey com- plied with Grant’s request for a written reference for the tribunal, declaring formally that, ‘I entertain no doubt that his opinions with regard to war are and have been for the last 7 or 8 years [a length of time actually suggested by Grant] such as he states’, and then on a more personal note (and with evident truth), ‘He is a man of transparent honesty and I know of no one less likely to be influenced, either in his views or his conduct by considerations of a personal or selfish kind.’66 In May 1918 Grant was also grateful for Strachey’s warning about accepting work as an official War Artist and the chance of thus being called to the colours, though he replied that ‘Neither I nor Nessa [Vanessa Bell] think there is any danger in accepting the work. I refused to join the army nominally as was first suggested and I do not cease in any way to be a C.O.’ He hoped the work would take at least eight months, and there existed an induce- ment at the end of it that he found he could not ignore; ‘I shall be only paid a living wage so that I see no reason why I should not take as long over it as I like.

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And then the freedom! I shall be able to do my own work.’67 So, with heavy irony, Grant ended the war an official War Artist. Unlike Duncan Grant and David Garnett, the writer Clive Bell was less ham- pered by tribunals and the machinery of authority and hence able to have more freedom to undertake his own work during the war due to a medical complaint (an ‘unhealed rupture’) that rendered him unfit for military service. However, until the necessities of the Military Service Act brought his medical history to the fore, he existed ‘in a world of agitation and uneasiness which is not at all what I like’, as he described to his wife Vanessa. He was unsure about ‘ventur- ing out’ and hesitant about his future position after the Act became fully effec- tive as he certainly classed himself as a conscientious objector and included himself in the group of his friends that he expected might end up in the army or jail before long. ‘I suppose we shall be conscripted in a few weeks’, he wrote to Vanessa in spring 1916, ‘and I dare say I shall be in jail before Duncan or Bunny [Garnett]’.68 Early 1916 found Bell considering announcing that he had volun- teered for agricultural work at Garsington (‘and so avoid all bother’, especially with his patriotic family) though by the middle of that year his attitude had stiffened, despite being, as he put it, ‘more and more in the councils of high liberalism … if I chose to eat humble pie I could doubtless make my own posi- tion secure, but I don’t choose to do anything of the sort’.69 Like Garnett and others at the start of the war, Bell had felt a need for experience of it and was keen to become involved. He described the prospect of war to Strachey as like being a compulsory spectator at a university match – a match which was expected to last for three years. The only way of mitigating the boredom was to come down from the terraces and ‘take a hand in the game’. He explained to Strachey about his medical disqualification from mili- tary service, though he admitted that this was ‘pure red-tape’, as he had suf- fered from this condition for years, and it had not prevented him shooting and big-game hunting in Alaska and elsewhere; he then asked Strachey how one applied for a possible job in the Army Medical or Service Corps. However, Bell’s initial enthusiasm for taking part in ‘the game’ soon waned as the reality of the war sunk in – to be replaced by work on his pamphlet Peace at Once, which appeared in 1915 and which Bell used to warn its potential readership of the dangers of championing war through to total victory. This course of action could only lead to harmful effects upon the whole of civilisation and hence an inconclusive and early peace settlement was preferable to the total destruction of Germany (and civilisation with it). War was simply ‘pur- poseless horror’, and its effects were likened to the outbreak and spread of a particularly virulent disease bringing untimely death and terror in its wake, he argued. Bell also sought to define what made a nation, and he concluded that a country had ‘no reality’ apart from the individuals comprising it. Each of these individuals had, or should have, an existence ‘of his or her own’ and, ‘since a nation consists of individuals, and since it can be shown that the sooner this

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war ends the better it will be for the majority of these individuals, it seems to me the part of a true patriot to agitate for immediate peace’.70 The ethics of jingoistic patriotism were incompatible with civilised values, a theme that he later explored further in his Civilization (1928), in which the concept of civilisation was defined as a sense of values combined with reason providing a setting where, ‘the intellect must be free to deal as it pleases with whatever comes its way, it must be free to choose its own terms, phrases and images, and to play with all things what tricks it will’. Set against this was military despotism of the war years when: Under the Military Service Acts we saw men in thousands taken from their homes, their work, their amusements, and driven to a life they detested to be followed shortly by a death they feared. They entered the Army for precisely the same reason that sheep enter the slaughterhouse. They obeyed because they were afraid to disobey. It was the same in all belligerent countries where conscription obtained … By 1917, at any rate, the issues at stake meant nothing to the ordinary conscript. If, instead of being told to march against the enemy, he had been told to march into the flames of Moloch’s sacred furnace, it had been all one to him … Now when a central govern- ment, depending frankly on a controlled press, courts martial, and the peculiar hor- ror inspired by the process of trial and execution, has the power to make men do this, it has power to make them do anything.71 Bell’s 1915 call for agitation for peace had been no mere journalistic out- burst; a few months after the introduction of conscription he was still to be found writing to his friends that, ‘we must keep the agitation up – in the house, in the country, on individuals – do impress that on all your friends. Give them a moment’s peace and they will fall asleep and we shall have to begin all over again.’72 He referred to a letter of his to the Daily News that was designed to wake up a government that had ‘gone to sleep’. Bell never regarded his exemp- tion certificate as a reason for inaction in regard to the conflict. In fact he was never quite sure if his status would be altered by the authorities; in August 1916, he reported to his wife that he was having trouble with the military who, he wrote, were trying to take advantage of the ‘ambiguous wording’ of his certificate to attempt to re-class his status to that of non-combatant from the existing one of total exemption from all service, military or otherwise. After the appearance of his Peace at Once, Bell was a marked man. The pamphlet was as unpopular with the authorities as it was popular with his friends and opponents of the war. Francis Birrell had written from Sommeille (while working for the Friends War Victims Relief Mission) to Lytton Strachey that: We have all been reading Clive’s pamphlet and following his persecution and he is now the hero of the Society of Friends, a strange destiny for him to attain, but the whole affair is too perfectly monstrous. I thought the pamphlet very bright indeed. England seems pretty bloody just now. One’s well out of it.73

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Like Bell, Birrell worried over the war’s effect on the course of civilisation. Previously, he told Strachey, the world had the makings of a ‘charming place’ but now something had ‘gone wrong with the machinery’ throwing up a need for some form of ‘divine mechanic’ to set the world to rights; only, ‘he never will come’. Despite his work for the Relief Committee, Birrell still found time to dispatch an appeal from France in February 1916 to his local tribunal in Chelsea. He was on the register of eligible males and fully expected to be summoned back to England at some point during the summer. ‘I am sure I shan’t get off’, he commented to Strachey on his appeal, ‘as God wasn’t mentioned and he is the only person or thing the Tribunals are frightened of except Zeppelins’.74 Like Francis Birrell, E.M. Forster chose humanitarian work abroad as a non- combatant and yet sought permission to have his case heard by a tribunal back in England. He had gone to Alexandria at the end of October 1915 as a Red Cross ‘searcher’, attempting to obtain information on missing soldiers from the wounded in hospitals. The following year, the Red Cross decided to release its able-bodied men for active service. Forster was told to undergo a medical on the understanding that he would ‘attest’ if passed fit for active duty. Although he was declared fit, he wrote a letter to Sir Courtold Thomson, the Chief Red Cross Commissioner, requesting to be excused from attesting on grounds of conscience. Eventually an interview was granted at which Forster declared his objection to be one of instinct and not of religious persuasion. He was given permission to return to England to state his case before a tribunal. However, Forster’s friends exerted pressure on high-ranking military acquaintances, and Thomson was informed that the army did not require Forster amongst its ranks. Forster wrote to his mother that he was ‘quite shameless over this wire-pulling. If I can’t keep out of the army by fair means then hey for foul!’75 Forster had no desire to return to an England that he described as ‘hag-ridden’ by the war. Like Birrell and Bell, he worried over the effect of the conflict on civilisation; ‘It is a damned bore, with a stalemate as the most possible outcome’, he predicted in November 1914, ‘But one has to see it through, and see it through with the knowledge that whichever side wins, civilization in Europe will be pipped for the next 30 years.’76 To Forster, the real war was a war of ‘Authoritarians v. Libertarians’ (as he later described it to his friend Siegfried Sassoon) and he had found his response to the war to be at first inadequate, confiding to his diary in August 1914 that, ‘Civilisation as it topples carries my brain with it’.77 He was profoundly irri- tated at first by his relation to a war the parameters of which he could not encompass in his mind, let alone in reality, and he felt he was confined to a ‘narrowing circle of light’78 as progress was turned back on itself. The war also meant, as it did for others, a drying up of creativity and, according to Forster’s biographer, the conflict was a sign that he had to (temporarily, at least) ‘give up all hope of creation’.79 He began to struggle with his fiction, the deliberately unpublishable Maurice being his only work-in-progress of the war period. Forster

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acknowledged the root of his inability to write (even letters) as, ‘the cause of all that is evil – ie. this war which saps away one’s spirit’,80 and he was perturbed by the prospect of ‘organisation and dehumanisation’ enveloping all streams of life. ‘Will the war leave nothing in the world but a card index?’ he asked a friend in 1918.81 By this time, however, he had come into a belief that, as defined to Siegfried Sassoon, due to Forster’s own anti-war sentiments, ‘one’s at war with the world’, and he was involved in a form of ‘defensive warfare’ on a personal level which had come to mean ‘Violent individualism. Conscious shirking’.82 Forster’s ‘inmost recesses’ had been invaded by ‘the cosmology of strife’, and he had been altered by the experience. He was aware of (and did not attempt to deny) the likely effect on the individual of the experience of the war, whether of a direct or indirect nature and, like others, part of him wanted from the start to be involved in some way. In August 1914, considering hospital work, he had felt as if, ‘the war exists on my account. If I died it would stop, but it is here to give me experiences if I choose to receive them.’83 On the death of Rupert Brooke, Forster had commented that Brooke’s ‘1914’ sonnets had been inspired by his romantic thoughts about war and not by his knowledge of it. If he had been spared to gain this knowledge, argued Forster, he would have expressed his thoughts with much greater ‘grim and grotesque realism’. As he wrote to his friend Malcolm Darling, ‘This war’s like the bible – we’re all going to take out of it what we bring to it’, adding that, ‘I, who never saw much purpose in the Universe, now see less’.84 In 1917 Forster wrote to Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson including a copy of his essay ‘Human Nature under War Conditions’ (in which he argued that men were now functioning merely under the twin stimuli of fear or sorrow) and commenting that the motivations towards experience were clear: ‘To merge myself. To test myself. To do my bit. To suffer what other soldiers suffer, that I may understand them. There – apart from compulsion – are the motives that send men to fight’. Forster pointed out that motivations of justice and honour were not enough: ‘They were good enough trimmings for peacetime, but the supreme need now is the preservation of life. Let us look after the bodies that there may be a next generation which may have the right to look after the soul.’85 The war, comments one of Virginia Woolf’s biographers, ‘overshadows Vir- ginia Woolf’s work … Her books are full of images of war: armies, guns, bombs, air-raids, battleships, shell-shock victims, war reports, photographs of war-vic- tims, voices of dictators’.86 Despite this, Woolf herself did not care for the war in contemporary fiction; she thought the war poetry of Siegfried Sassoon to be too close to the reality, just as she flinched at the sound of the guns in France in March 1918, clearly audible at her Sussex home, Asheham House, as the Ger- mans pushed the Allies back towards Amiens. She wrote that the events across the Channel were ‘towering over us too closely and too tremendously’ to be fictionalised without a ‘powerful jolt in the perspective’ occurring.87 Patriotism

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in literature she described as ‘insidious poison’. Woolf assimilated the war only after the event and then only with a subtle tone. Another of her biographers has pointed out how the character of Jacob in Jacob’s Room was based in part on her idolised brother Thoby, and the novel is partly a structure to join Thoby’s death in 1906 with the Great War, ‘an attempt to link her own personal sense of loss to the pervasive feeling of loss and disintegration which impinged on every- one in England in the early 1920s’.88 It had only been when her sister Vanessa Bell left London in March 1916, to keep house for Duncan Grant and David Garnett who were fruit farming to strengthen their claims for exemption from military service at Wissett Lodge in Suffolk, that Virginia Woolf admitted to her friend Ka Cox that Bloomsbury, in its London incarnation, seemed to have vanished into thin air ‘like the morning mist’.89 This could be seen to be representative of the differing responses of the group of friends to the war; some, like Keynes, burrowed further into the capi- tal – to the very heart of Whitehall, while others, like Vanessa Bell, moved away from a London dominated by war to the relative peace of the country. Bell’s country life and her perceived inactivity in response to the war has perhaps been taken for indifference by some, but, like her sister, her anti-war feeling lay in her repudiation of the importance given to the war by those ‘in favour’ of it and, far from being inactive, right from the start she possessed a keen apprecia- tion of the war’s effect upon her world of friendships and beyond, writing to Roger Fry during the first few days of war that, ‘We have been in such a state of gloom about the war that it’s difficult to think of anything else’.90 In mid-August 1914, Fry read to Vanessa the Foreign Office White Paper concerning Britain’s involvement in the European war, and admitted to her husband Clive that she found it complicated and would have to read it again to herself to fully understand its implications, though she reported that, ‘It has led to a great deal of argument here’. Also at that time, she persuaded her brother Adrian to delay his decision to volunteer for the armed forces: ‘I told him I thought it very foolish’, she reported to her husband, whom she encouraged in his anti-war writing (Peace at Once), while commenting sadly that, ‘evidently the world is so mad that no-one will take it [her husband’s pamphlet] seri- ously’.91 Vanessa Bell’s initial response to the war was to travel to her sister Virginia at Asheham House where she and Grant painted furiously. As she wrote to Fry: If one simply waited for news one would rapidly get into a state of melancholia … One can do no good, unluckily, by thinking of the horrors going on and though you know I don’t ignore them, it seems to me now the only thing we can do is to go on keeping some kind of decent existence going.92 She deplored the fact that the only option open to people was to fight and if a person attempted to do something else, they were immediately accused of ‘mak- ing a muddle’. She comprehended the ‘awful’ pressure on people such as her brother and Grant to enlist, and she supported Grant in his attempt to resist the

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‘moral pressure’ to fight, believing that for Britain to become involved in the conflict was ‘perfectly absurd’ while some sort of stand against a huge army being sent abroad was ‘most necessary’. When she saw that the newspapers were encouraging a long war resulting in total defeat of Germany, she thought it ‘quite wrong’ and complained that she felt it ‘difficult to concentrate one’s mind’ amid the rumours and counter-rumours of the escalating conflict. ‘One must simply work and try to find out what is permanent’, she concluded. By the high-watermark of the death of Rupert Brooke in April 1915, Vanessa Bell had moved to Eleanor House on the Sussex coast. She found all the talk about Brooke largely pointless just as she found talk of the war liable to ‘put a stop’ to other, creative thoughts, and she thought it most vital that these cre- ative thoughts ‘shouldn’t be killed’. Hence she deliberately resisted returning to London. ‘How idiotic to go home and listen to talk about the war and Rupert’, she wrote to her husband, with Brooke’s death symbolising the war itself and consequently her desire to be apart from it. However, the war’s effects reached out to her through its influence upon her friends as they made plans to resist being forced to fight. When she finally returned to London, she found only a ‘state of general gloom’ which seemed to have taken the place of the social life she had formerly known; she deplored the fact that, ‘no-one can now lead their normal lives’. ‘How damnable it is’, she exclaimed to Fry, ‘that people with ideas utterly different from one’s own should have so much power over one’s life’.93 The advent of conscription in 1916 and its meaning with regard to her friends finally ‘shattered Vanessa’s carapace of ignorance’, according to her biogra- pher.94 She had never been knowingly ignorant but had constructed an artificial shell of unthinking around herself for protection against the war’s malign pres- sure upon her creative life. There occurred a closing of ranks at Asheham House in January 1916 when Vanessa and the Woolfs were joined by Clive Bell, Grant, Garnett, Keynes and Lytton Strachey amid much debate, with Vanessa report- ing to Fry that, ‘Duncan and Bunny [Garnett] and Lytton are all agreed that they would sooner go to prison than be forced to become soldiers’, while she feared that the war’s effect upon the normal course of existence would render life in England after the war’s end ‘impossible’. To her, the lack of conscription was the one thing that made England better than other countries, ‘in spite of all … but if that goes I don’t see any reason for bringing up one’s children to be English’.95 This perhaps helps to explain one side of her desire to bring up her boys in the country during the war where they would not be exposed to the conflict to the same extent as in London. However, such was her anger and frustration at the loss of personal freedom that the introduction of conscription would entail, that she admitted to Fry that, for once, she felt a desire to involve herself in public affairs and, although she felt that she lacked the appropriate background and necessary skills to do so, she did agree to undertake office work on a voluntary basis for the National Council for Civil Liberties.

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By the time of Grant and Garnett’s appearance before the Blything tribunal in May 1916, another move – to Wissett Lodge – had occurred, and Vanessa Bell and her children were now firmly planted in the country.96 ‘It is difficult to think freely of all kinds of other things with this uncertainty hanging over one’, she wrote to Fry, ‘… we’re not just leading a perfectly happy and contented life in the country because it has gone on so long’. She admitted, however, that it was much better to be painting in the country than in London, ‘and if one only knew this [i.e. the resolution of Grant and Garnett’s case] were going on, one could work hard’. The continuance of the state of affairs brought about by the war was beginning to trouble her more deeply: all these months of never being able to look ahead at all do make one long for some settlement and I had begun to hope it was settled. I think it gets on one’s nerves at last – everything depending on letters and committees etc. One tries not to speculate as to what will happen but one can’t help it and then one gets into a horrid state of mind. Vanessa Bell perceived how the war, in addition to disrupting the production of the art of both herself and Grant, was also adversely affecting the creative processes of her friends; for example, she thought Fry’s ideas to be expressed in too ‘fragmentary’ a fashion, and she encouraged him in particular to produce a solid piece of work as soon as the war was over, ‘to start us all off again’.97 While Grant tried to paint what he viewed as possibly his final pictures before the commencement of his land work, the Central Committee having granted himself and Garnett alternative agricultural employment, Bell travelled to Lewes and actually secured the work from a farmer, although they all still had to contend with an unfavourable report concerning suspect activities at Wissett Lodge which was sent to the War Agricultural Committee on the probable prompting of suspicious local residents. Partly in response to this, in October 1916, the whole group moved to Charleston, the farmhouse near Firle, which was to be Vanessa’s home for the next three years (and in which she would eventually die, forty-five years later). Vanessa Bell spent the remainder of the war bringing up her children, looking after Grant (who came close to a breakdown, due to anxiety and overwork) and painting, although she was still aware of the consequences of outside events prompted by the war, such as the Manpower Bill of April 1918 (the time of the great German offensive on the Western Front). This Bill, in addition to raising the age of conscription to cover those in the category of forty-one to fifty years (prompt- ing her to fear whether Fry might be affected) also, she noted with alarm, pro- posed to give the authorities new powers to call up previously exempted men working on the land. ‘One can only hope they won’t think it worthwhile to do so’, she wrote to Fry anxiously, ‘but as things are at present [i.e. the German offensive] that seems rather a forlorn hope’. Her only hope this time was that Grant would be rejected on medical grounds, ‘but meanwhile all is uncertain again which is horrid after thinking it was settled’.98 Bell was not able to feel

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totally free of the war’s interference until its actual end when she acknowledged to Fry that, although things had finally become calmer in her and Grant’s country existence, ‘I think the relief now is simply in thinking that the horror has stopped’.99 The physical self-removal from the war of Vanessa Bell was echoed to a certain extent in mental terms by her sister Virginia. Right at the start of the conflict, during the first hours of war, Virginia Woolf had merely noted the extra trains being run to and from the coast to transport people fleeing the Continent to London and beyond. However, after leaving Asheham House, which Virginia described to Ka Cox as being ‘practically under martial law’, the Woolfs went to London where Virginia was immediately struck by the con- versation of her friends such as Lady Ottoline and Clive Bell, ‘they talked and talked, and said it was the end of civilisation, and the rest of our lives are worthless’.100 During the next few months, the Woolfs busied themselves with looking for alternative accommodation, eventually finding Hogarth House in Richmond at Christmas 1914. They were also immersed in their respective writing, Woolf working on her second novel, Night and Day. She remained telescopic in her view of the war and the world outside her window, believing, as she wrote in her diary, that the human race seemed to have no character or any real goals and fought only from ‘a dreary sense of duty’, though she ap- peared to take the same line as Bertrand Russell when she wrote to Duncan Grant describing her distress at what she saw as an ‘evolution’ in attitudes to life, brought on by the war. In peacetime, she had regarded her compatriots as essentially harmless, if stupid; ‘but now they have been roused they seem full of the most violent and filthy passions’.101 Woolf was unimpressed by organised peace movements and found no inspira- tion at a Fabian meeting on ‘The Conditions of Peace’ at the end of January 1915, describing those attending as appearing ‘singular and impotent’. Her insu- lar reaction was given full reign by the onset of her mental breakdown in the spring of 1915 from which she did not recover until the end of that year. Virginia suffered from recurring mental difficulties all her life, though at this particular time she was perhaps more prone to attack due to possible tension between her inner, creative life and the outside war-life of the nation and her friends. The solitude of illness enabled her to establish a domestic routine that would assist her throughout the remainder of the war. By the time of her thirty-fourth birth- day in January 1916, Woolf had settled into a routine of writing in the morning, walking in the afternoon and reading with her husband in the evening, although life and opinions did not remain so sedate for long. She wrote to her friend Mar- garet Llewelyn Davies that, due to the effect of the war, which she described as ‘this preposterous masculine fiction’, she felt herself becoming ‘steadily more femi- nist’.102 Under the influence of Llewelyn Davies, Woolf later chaired meetings of the Richmond branch of the Women’s Co-operative Guild at Hogarth House, also the base of the Hogarth Press, the first publication of which appeared in July 1917.

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Virginia Woolf’s practical activities also extended to appealing to Lady Rob- ert Cecil on behalf of Duncan Grant and his appeal to the Central Tribunal (the Chairman of which was Lord Salisbury, Lady Cecil’s brother-in-law) regarding alternative employment; ‘The first tribunal was so prejudiced against some that one felt it was rather hopeless to expect a fair hearing’, she wrote, ‘The war is a nightmare isn’t it – two cousins of mine were killed this last week, and I sup- pose in other families it’s much worse’.103 In May 1916, Leonard Woolf was awarded exemption from military service due to his trembling hands, and his wife had confided to her sister that she herself was still mentally ‘in a very shaky state’ and would probably succumb to a complete breakdown ‘if they took him’. Although she observed to Ka Cox that, ‘the whole of our world does nothing but talk about conscription’, and regarded the summer of 1917 as a period when the rest of the human race had sunk to new depths (‘how little one believes what anyone says now’, she com- mented to Margaret Llewelyn Davies) it was no coincidence that the Hogarth Press sprang into life during the same period – an individual expression of pro- ductive creativity to counterbalance the muffling effect of both the war and her own mental instability. Woolf’s response to the conflict was, in her own words, to repudiate the importance attached to it by a violent world, although, with the guns audible from the garden at Asheham in which she was reading Wordsworth in the spring of 1918, Virginia could not help but admit to her diary that there was an ‘odd pallor in those particular days of sunshine’. After a visit to see her brother-in- law Philip who had been wounded in action and was now in the Fishmonger’s Hall in London (transformed into a temporary hospital), Woolf was struck by ‘a feeling of the uselessness of it all, breaking these people and mending them again’, a typical example of her ability to always see ‘the skull beneath the skin’ regarding the human condition. She later reasoned that the ability of a person to kill another human being (and by implication her inability, and that of her friends) was that, ‘one’s imagination is too sluggish to conceive what his life means to him – the infinite possibilities of a succession of days which are furled in him, and have already been spent’.104 In the days following the Armistice, Virginia felt that she had experienced such a change of perspective due to the war that she saw no meaning to the ‘gossip of parties’ that now abounded and nothing to celebrate in the wet feath- ers, languishing flags and ‘sordid’ crowds of a rainy London. The only positive thing to come out of the war, she reflected, was the fact that, for some, it had been an opportunity to stretch their minds in order to consider something uni- versal, although now, ‘we contract them at once to the squabbles of Lloyd George and a General Election’. From a situation of many minds concentrated, rightly or wrongly, willing or not, upon a single point, ‘one feels now that the whole bunch has burst asunder and flown off with the utmost vigour in differ- ent directions. We are once more a nation of individuals’.105

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Although Virginia Woolf had found the extremes of the Garsington Manor of Ottoline and Philip Morrell a little heavy on the senses (‘too many scents and silks … at moments the sense of it seemed to flag’) she had comprehended its value as a haven to the threatened anti-war artistic community; ‘I think Ott. deserves some credit for keeping her ship in full sail, as she certainly does … O. and P. and Garsington House provide a good deal’, and, despite her rather deprecatory comments about Lady Ottoline made to friends, she con- fided to her diary after her first visit in November 1917 that, ‘On the whole I like Ottoline better than her friends have prepared one for liking her. Her vitality seemed to me a credit to her, and in private talk her vapours give way to some quite clear bursts of shrewdness’.106 At their first meeting in 1909, Lady Ottoline had ‘swooped down’ on Woolf at 46 Gordon Square to issue her with an invitation to one of her celebrated ‘Thursday nights’. Woolf had accepted and had taken Rupert Brooke with her to be introduced to their hostess, whom she described at the time as being regarded (even then) as a ‘disembodied spirit’ amongst her artists and writers. Both women were out- siders, propelled by their acute individual sensibilities to an observational position from without rather than within. The coming of the war and their views on it served to exaggerate this sense of ‘otherness’, though resulting in different approaches; Lady Ottoline, like Bertrand Russell, translating thoughts into deeds whilst Woolf, characteristically, transcribed them into the art of words, written and spoken. Just as Bertrand Russell could be said to have both thought and operated outside of the intimate circle of his Bloomsbury friends in his response to the war, so too did his sometime mistress and friend, Lady Ottoline. Though described by some as the patroness of Bloomsbury, she had in fact a much wider circle of acquaintances and activities and was never regarded as such by Bloomsbury them- selves, though they appreciated shared aesthetic goals, such as the genuine qual- ity of Lady Ottoline’s passionate support for a life lived in pursuit of truth and beauty and her deeply-held anti-war sentiments. It was not only Bloomsbury and her ‘soul-mate’ Russell that perceived her acute anti-war feeling; ‘Lady Ottoline’, remembered the anti-war writer Mary Agnes Hamilton, ‘had a great deal to do with holding the pacifist movement together and keeping it warm’. Although Russell’s intellect was the dominant one and his voice ‘was the voice we followed, it was Ottoline who held us together’.107 From the final days of peace in 1914, when many of her friends were by no means anti-war, Lady Ottoline and her husband had viewed the whole business as ‘absolute madness’, Philip Morrell being one of the few Members of Parliament to speak out continuously against the conflict from the first. At the end of July, with the war fast approaching, Lady Ottoline could only see ‘the ruin and suffering and devastation of it … simply to erect a sort of snobbish Pride into a Deity’.108 For Ottoline Morrell, the motives behind the war were based from the start on a distortion of the moral lodestar of friendship and creative co-operation,

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and she deplored the abounding desire to crush a fellow civilised nation. On August 9th 1914 she wrote in her journal: It amazes me how without any compunction the whole of Europe throws aside the moral and humane code that has been built up by years of civilised life. They all seem swallowed up in an earthquake, and out of chaos has come a lurid light that glorifies brutality and savagery, casting upon it a theatrical, rosy, false light which turns its real grinning, hideous face into that of some divine goddess.109 In this, she echoed Mary Agnes Hamilton’s similar sense of a ‘theatrical trans- formation scene’ being enacted by the authorities in the first months of war (see Chapter 6). Philip Morrell spoke out against the folly of the war in the Commons on 3 August 1914, standing alone with nearly all the House violently waving their order papers and calling on him to ‘Sit down!’ While Lady Ottoline and her husband hosted a meeting of the fledgling Union of Democratic Control in the drawing room of 44 Bedford Square, the house was also used to shelter Belgian refugees. The Morrell’s popular Thursday parties began to be held again from December 1914 and former guests who were now ‘pro-war’ were not invited. However, Lady Ottoline’s reaction to the war, like that of her lover, Bertrand Russell, also had a practical side; she worked for the Friends of Foreigners organisation, providing comfort where possible to the families of interned Ger- man fathers or husbands. She shared with Russell an intense sadness at seeing young men, ‘full of new thought and life’, sent abroad to probable death, and she continually urged him to harness his intellectual ability to his loathing of the war in order to convince others of their point of view through his writing and practical efforts (‘Why don’t you go and see Grey [the Foreign Secretary]’, she urged him at one point), while herself feeling the war ever more keenly. By the end of 1914 she wrote to Russell that the depression she experienced, ‘eats into one and seems to deaden everything’.110 It was in spring 1915 that the Morrells moved to their new home in Oxfordshire, Garsington Manor, which became a pilgrim’s rest for individuals seeking escape from the war. At first, Lady Ottoline was relieved to be more isolated from the ‘torrent of life’ that had existed in London. The capital, she felt, had become entirely changed by the war. ‘There seemed no spot that one touched that didn’t fly open and show some picture of suffering, some macabre dance of death’, she recalled: I felt very strange and out of tune with everything there … overcome by the loneli- ness … the sense of isolation of individuals; millions of people rushing about, so separate from each other and so alone. The war absorbs all attention and leaves London a chaos.111 At Garsington, it was hoped, these people would have an opportunity to think and talk in freedom. The house was to be ‘a harbour, a refuge in the storm’, for those tossed about helplessly on the waves of war, for, as she saw it:

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The destructive torrent is so strong that it sweeps everyone with it … Any delicate creative effort is blasted and seems trivial, for the war is so real and terrible, it blots out anything else and makes other work seem valueless, except that of passionate resistance, and that at times seems quixotic and futile.112 One such individual to be given refuge and support was Siegfried Sassoon whose poems Lady Ottoline had liked and responded to by letter. Whilst con- valescing at Somerville College, Oxford in August 1916, and through the intro- duction of Oscar Wilde’s tireless promoter Robbie Ross, Sassoon visited Garsington unannounced and was invited to spend a week there the following month, during which time Lady Ottoline inscribed in a book for Sassoon her conception of the purpose of life at Garsington – a world apart from the war’s destructive influence. ‘Come then’, she wrote: gather here – all who have passion and who desire to create new conditions of life – new visions of art and literature and new magic worlds of poetry and music. If I could but feel that days at Garsington had strengthened your efforts to live the noble life: to live freely, recklessly, with clear Reason released from convention – no longer absorbed in small personal events but valuing personal affairs as part of a grand whole – above all to live with passionate desire for Truth and Love and Understand- ing and Imagination.113 A deep mutual appreciation followed, with Lady Ottoline respecting Sassoon’s ability to see and feel the war as a poet and artist and his ‘woodland wildness’ (compared with most intellectuals who, she wrote, ‘walk along half-blind’). When Sassoon came to make his public protest against the war in 1917, it was Lady Ottoline whom he consulted first and she who encouraged him and intro- duced him to Bertrand Russell for advice on the wording of the Soldier’s Decla- ration, writing to Russell that, ‘I do wish he could join onto you, for I think he might find an outlet for his energies in that way’.114 Other guests were not treated with as much sympathy; both the Bishop of Oxford and Asquith him- self were lectured on the issue of compulsion and the treatment of conscien- tious objectors when they came to visit, with the Prime Minister being first separated from the other guests and marched up to Ottoline’s bedroom (‘I was very clear and forcible!’ she recalled). In Lady Ottoline’s response to the war we find echoed many of the familiar themes of reaction we have already observed in association with male writers and artists: a championing of the individual and personal consciousness, an awareness of a diminishment of creative capacity, the blunting of individual sensibility and a fear for the wreckage of civilisation. She wrote to Russell in the summer of 1917 that she felt that the pressures of the war ‘have worn us thin – worn away all feeling. I feel as empty as a drum, without any thoughts or ideas – one feels as if one had gone soft inside.’115 In January 1918 she confided to her journal that ‘This cataclysm sweeps away all individuality and forms like a flood of horror over the world, crushing, overwhelming all design, all form …’116 Her driving motivation was to champion common humanity and an acute

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concern over ‘the wrecking of the fine eye of civilisation’ and a ‘breaking down of much that was fine and harmonious’. She saw that she was largely isolated in her opinions and motivations: ‘What a different world mine is to my sister-in- law [the Duchess of Portland]’; she wrote to Russell: She would hate and loathe a thinker or artist and all my thoughts of love and sym- pathy go out to them and keeping these fragile things alive now. Ideas, art, poetry. The passion for work – ‘war work’ – kills these lovely creations. It seems like a corrugated iron shed put up on top of a heavenly garden.117 Isolated she might be in her views on the war, but those views were firmly held and her themes, as we can see, are familiar. As she once wrote in her journal: Nothing can convert me to feel that war is right. It is so obviously a violation of all civilisation and of the natural growth and development of man that comes from contact and understanding between people and nations … It is surely essential that individuals should be treated as sacred until they have proved themselves pernicious. In war, all reason, all right intelligence, is thrown overboard, or forced to serve brutality and destruction. And men relapse into animals – to fight, men must be- come brutes. No-one who had not become so could go out deliberately to maim and inflict torture and death on other men or to destroy ruthlessly beautiful buildings and land.118 Although it was not until the 1920s that Frances Partridge (then Frances Marshall) came into the orbit of Ottoline Morrell, Virginia Woolf and the rest of Bloomsbury, her attitude to the war had been of a similar kind. A lifelong pacifist, she dates her anti-war feeling from the middle of the war when she was sixteen: ‘I am more a pacifist than a devotee of any other -ism … and I would call it moralistic or ethically based’.119 Her future husband, Ralph Partridge, fought in the war and became a Major in his early twenties but resigned his commission as soon as the war ended, having been convinced on moral grounds that the pacifist argument was ‘overwhelming’, as he stated to the Appeal Tri- bunal for Conscientious Objectors during the Second World War in 1943. Dur- ing the earlier war, ‘All civilized values had disappeared’ and both Frances Marshall and Ralph Partridge saw their country dominated by ‘fear, hatred, anger and revenge’. The Marshall family had always approved of a love of nature and free expression, and the heroes of Frances’ father had been Darwin, Ruskin, Tennyson and Leslie Stephen, also a family friend (and father of Vanessa Bell and Virginia Woolf). In her memoirs, Partridge recalled the failure of communication between the young men returning from the front and those at home who ‘lacked the imagi- nation to bridge the gap’. In 1918 she went up to Newnham College, Cam- bridge, where J.E. McTaggart was lecturing, and G.E. Moore could still be encountered, his eyes usually buried in a book. Her brother had been on holi- day in Germany when war was declared, and was interned. When he was fi- nally released, he had been transformed from a lively and boisterous

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undergraduate of nineteen into a shy young man with a voice kept lowered, ‘as if he didn’t want to be heard’. Partridge felt that experiencing the war was akin to living a kind of sleeping life: ‘You’re practically under an anaesthetic.’120 Normal life was also disrupted to a large extent on the Home Front as every- one, including older people and women, was sucked into the war effort: They somehow had no time, everybody was put to it, in a way, to do something which would concern the war and it was thought awful that they shouldn’t do that by the supporters of the war, who after all were the majority. But there were also unthinking people who really hadn’t thought it out. Partridge, emboldened by her upbringing with its lack of strict convention and her strong but threatened sense of individuality, enjoyed encountering these stray ‘unthinking’ people on the train to London and engaging them in conver- sation: because everybody talked to each other more in the war, – perhaps some village woman – I would try to make her understand how the German soldiers were really people like her sons … individuals … they [the people she talked to] kept reacting very quickly during anything like that – anything that was human.121 In examining the cases of these women associated with Bloomsbury we ob- serve women for whom the war was instinctively wrong. Woolf and Bell had grown up in an intellectual atmosphere and had been left free by the death of their father to absorb the ethos of their brother’s Bloomsbury friends. Partridge had been raised in a liberal, free-thinking family and had experienced the inde- pendence of Newnham College, Cambridge and a room and allowance of her own with which to cultivate her ideas. With her aristocratic upbringing, Lady Ottoline had also had time and leisure in which to develop her very particular aesthetic sensibilities. These women all reacted instinctively against the war due to a potent combination of aesthetic and humanistic concerns. The war drew forth these similar concerns, even if they found expression in different forms: Bell’s self-imposed isolation and Woolf’s mental echoing of this, Lady Ottoline’s practical involvement with other aesthetic anti-war reaction and Partridge’s formation of an intellectual, humanistic view on war that would influence her whole life. E.M. Forster’s earlier concerns about the war’s effects neatly summarise the general views of the friends who constituted the Bloomsbury Group and its immediate circle. Forster’s belief that civilisation would be ‘pipped’ whichever side won was shared by Lytton Strachey and Clive Bell, with Bell’s Peace at Once a clarion call for early negotiations in order to preserve what was still left of a civilisation which had been about to fulfil its potential, but which was now being sent into reverse by the destructive energies unleashed by the war. This recognition of the destructive capacity of mankind was apparent in the writings of Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, one of the ‘mentors’ of Bloomsbury (and repeated in the thoughts and writings of Bertrand Russell, discussed in Chapter

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3). Dickinson championed a life lived for ‘impassioned reason’ and hence the immense shock of the plunge into war.. To ‘friends of reason’, such as Bertrand Russell and himself, the war, with its submersion of peaceful creativity, could not be anything but a crushing blow, both intellectually and emotionally. Though the conflict crushed Dickinson utterly, the younger individuals of Bloomsbury attempted to ‘keep their heads’ while the war raged around them. G.E. Moore had taught the Bloomsbury Group an awareness of the concept of intrinsic good, and that attaching this concept to things in isolation allowed for relative degrees of value to be decided upon and hence a moral value system could be established, allowing a more truthful view of the world: a system that appealed to intuition, reason and reflective judgement. Moore had had little time for public virtues, believing that the only rules to which the individual should conform were those widely approved by common sense. In all other situations the individual should decide what positive good they could effect from each separate case directed by a knowledge of the intrin- sic goodness and badness of things. Hence the individual who possessed a sound perception of these intrinsic values should be left free to make his or her own decisions as to the right or wrong of a particular issue. This particularly applied at a time when the Government seemed, more than ever, to be taking decisions on behalf of the people – decisions which seemed to threaten their individuality. A person’s conduct would look after itself and be correct if it were guided by an awareness of intrinsic good – this was Bloomsbury’s belief. J.M. Keynes later commented that he and his friends, ‘repudiated entirely customary morals, conventions and traditional wisdom. We were …. immoral- ists … we recognised no moral obligation on us, no inner sanction, to conform or to obey’. Also, as well as being their own judges, ‘we claimed the right to judge every individual case on its merits’, as well as the self-control and wisdom to judge successfully.122 According to Keynes, when the Bloomsbury Group be- came ‘immoralists’, they also rejected some of Moore’s moral philosophy (in particular, his chapter in Principia Ethica, ‘Ethics in Relation to Conduct’) while accepting his basic ‘religion’ of an awareness of intrinsic goods (including beauty and friendship). Rejecting some of Moore’s doctrine allowed Bloomsbury to further repudiate conventional moralistic obligations. Hence they were able, in one sense, to be their own judges and claim – as Keynes and Strachey did – a moral objection to surrendering their right of decision and becoming part of the military machine. As we have seen, some of the Bloomsbury Group had been tempted to enlist during the first weeks of the war – not from a rush of patriotic fervour but, as David Garnett explained, more in order that they might share in what was clearly a great ‘human experience’. In order to somehow test himself, E.M. Forster expressed a desire to ‘merge’ himself with the war; Bloomsbury had always regarded the ‘passionate contemplation’ of life, people and events as not only morally worthwhile but necessary. This desire to experience the war in

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a direct manner – despite a moral, humanistic or aesthetic opposition to it – was to be replicated, not only in the cases of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfrid Owen but also among the more obscure, as discussed in Chapter 7. The themes of humanistic, aesthetic and moral reaction exhibited by Bloomsbury to the war – such as the submersion of individual sensibilities, the threat to the progress of civilisation and the drying up or diverting of creative energies – were to be perceived and echoed by other people, and in one particular individual – Bertrand Russell – they coalesced completely.

Notes

1 The Bloomsbury Group grew out of intellectual friendships forged in undergraduate Cam- bridge during the 1880s and 1890s. Although Thoby Stephen did not live long into the twentieth century, it was his siblings, Adrian, Vanessa and Virginia, who, freed by the death of their strict father, formed the nucleus of what became the Bloomsbury Group. The ‘mem- bers’ of the group often had difficulty in naming the entire fellowship, with characters seem- ing to drift in and out at will. In later years, some even denied the existence of any such group at all. The ‘core’ individuals included the economist John Maynard Keynes; the art critic and essayist Clive Bell and his wife Vanessa, the artist; the formidable writing and publishing team of Leonard and Virginia Woolf; Virginia’s brother Adrian Stephen; the artist Duncan Grant (sometime lover of Vanessa) and the literary biographer Lytton Strachey. Others such as the writers David Garnett and E.M. Forster and friends and mentors such as Francis Birrell, Bertrand Russell, Ottoline Morrell and the art critic Roger Fry seemed to hover on the edges, sometimes precariously. 2 J.K. Johnstone, ‘The Philosophic Background and Works of Art of the Group known as Bloomsbury’, PhD. thesis (University of Leeds, 1952), p. 2. 3 Dickinson belonged to the older generation of Cambridge Apostles (including J.E. McTaggart, Nathaniel Wedd and Roger Fry) whose spiritual humanism had a profound effect on G.E. Moore, Bertrand Russell and, subsequently, the members of Bloomsbury themselves. J.K. Johnstone points out that, ‘Even more important to Bloomsbury than Moore’s philosophy was the Cambridge Humanism which is behind that philosophy’. Ibid., p. 444. For more on the influence upon Bloomsbury of the older Apostles and ‘Cambridge Humanism’ see J.K. Johnstone, The Bloomsbury Group (London, 1954) and Paul Levy, G.E. Moore and the Cambridge Apostles (Oxford, 1981). 4 Ottoline Morrell, Journal, June 1916, cited in Ottoline at Garsington – Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell 1915–1918 , ed. R. Gathorne-Hardy (London, 1974), p. 117. 5 Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, ‘The Basis of a Permanent Peace’ in C.R. Buxton (ed.), To- wards a Lasting Settlement (London, 1915), p. 11. 6 M.R. Pollock, ‘British Pacifism during the First World War – the Cambridge–Bloomsbury contribution’, PhD thesis (Columbia University, 1971, University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, MI), p. 1. 7 E.M. Forster, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (London, 1934), p. 114. 8 Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, Letters From John Chinaman and Other Essays (London, 1901), p. 27. 9 Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, ‘The Holy War’, the Nation, 8 Aug. 1914, cited in Pollock, ‘British Pacifism’, p. 132. 10 Pollock, ‘British Pacifism’, p. 135. 11 Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, After the War (London, 1915), pp. 17–18. 12 Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, The Choice Before Us. (New York, 1919), p. 53. First published

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London, 1917. 13 Cited in Forster, Dickinson, p. 162. 14 Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, ‘The Holy War’, the Nation, vol. 15, no. 19, 8 Aug. 1914. 15 Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson [Letter to Mrs. Ashbee, 11 Nov. 1914], cited in Forster, Dickinson, p. 158. 16 The Bryce Group was so known simply because two early meetings were attended by Lord Bryce. It was a group, established by Dickinson, of interested persons who met to discuss and research the possibility of a future League of Nations. It was on behalf of this group that Dickinson went to the Hague in 1915 to meet with international pacifists, at which meeting the Society for a Durable Peace was formed. As a result of affiliating with other like-minded groups, the Bryce Group became the League of Nations Society in May 1915, which subse- quently became the League of Nations Union in October 1918. 17 Publications included: The War and the Way Out (1914); After the War (1915); The Euro- pean Anarchy (1916); The Choice Before Us (1917) and Problems of International Settle- ment (1918). 18 The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Volume One, ed. A.O. Bell (London, 1977), 21 Oct. 1917, p. 64. 19 G.L. Dickinson, War: Its Nature, Cause and Cure (London, 1923), pp. 6–7, 44. 20 Pollock, ‘British Pacifism’, p. 10. 21 McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, William Ready Division of Archives and Research Collection, Bertrand Russell, Papers, (McM,BRP), Ottoline Morrell to Bertrand Russell, 710 082299, 31 July 1914. 22 McM,BRP, Ottoline Morrell to Bertrand Russell, 710 082363, 11 Nov. 1914. 23 Quentin Bell, ‘Recollections and Reflections on Maynard Keynes’, Lecture 3, Keynes and the Bloomsbury Group – the Fourth Keynes Seminar, University of Kent, 1978, ed. D. Crabtree and A.P. Thirlwall (London, 1980), pp. 75–6. 24 J.M. Keynes, ‘My Early Beliefs’ (first read to the Bloomsbury Memoir Club in September 1938) Collected Writings of J.M. Keynes, Volume X: Essays in Biography, ed. Elizabeth Johnson (London, 1972), pp. 435, 446. 25 Raymond Williams, ‘Bloomsbury as a Social and Cultural Group’, Lecture 2, Keynes and the Bloomsbury Group, p. 62. 26 J.M. Keynes to N. Keynes, 14 Aug. 1914, cited in Sally Weston, ‘Bertrand Russell, Leonard Woolf and John Maynard Keynes – A Biographical Examination of the Influences Estab- lished before 1914, which Dictated their Reaction to the First World War’, MA thesis, Uni- versity of Kent, 1992, p. 90. 27 J.M. Keynes to G.L. Strachey, 27 Nov. 1914, cited in Roy F. Harrod, The Life of John Maynard Keynes (London, 1951), p. 200. 28 Bertrand Russell to Ottoline Morrell, cited in Ronald W. Clark, The Life of Bertrand Russell (London, 1975), pp. 260–1. 29 Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes – Volume One: Hopes Betrayed (London, 1983), p. 157. 30 Cited in Elizabeth Johnson, ‘Keynes’ Attitude to Compulsory Military Service – A Com- ment’, Economic Journal, ed. R. Harrod and R.A.G. Robinson, vol LXX, no. 277, March 1960, pp. 160–5. 31 Cited in Skidelsky, Keynes, p. 345. 32 Austin Robinson, ‘A Personal View’, in Essays on Maynard Keynes, ed. Milo Keynes (Cam- bridge, 1975), p. 16. 33 Tate Gallery Archive, Charleston Trust Papers (TGA,CTP hereafter), 8010.8.193, Vanessa Bell to Roger Fry, 4 Jan. 1916. 34 Weston, ‘Russell, Woolf and Keynes – A Biographical Examination’, p. 99. 35 J.M. Keynes to Mrs Keynes, 14 April 1918, cited in Harrod, Keynes, p. 226. 36 The Diary of Virginia Woolf: Volume One – 1915–1919, ed. Anne Olivier Bell (London,

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1977), 12 Dec. 1917, p. 89. 37 British Library Manuscript Collection (BL,MC hereafter), Add MSS 60710.101, Lytton Strachey to James Strachey, 16 Aug. 1914. 38 Lytton Strachey to Dorothy Bussy, 21 Aug. 1914, cited in Michael Holroyd, Lytton Strachey – the New Biography (London, 1994), pp. 309, 311. 39 BL,MC, Add MSS 60710.105, Lytton Strachey to James Strachey, 18 Aug. 1914. 40 Ibid. 41 BL,MC, Add MSS 60710.141, L. Strachey to J. Strachey, 9 Sept. 1914. 42 Ibid. 43 Cited in Holyrod, Strachey, p. 323. 44 Ibid. 45 BL,MC, Add MSS, 60710.214, L. Strachey to J. Strachey, 11 Aug. 1915. 46 BL,MC, Add MSS, 60710.237, L. Strachey to J. Strachey, 30 Oct. 1915. 47 BL,MC, Add MSS, 60711.2, L. Strachey to J. Strachey, 14 Jan. 1916. 48 Lytton Strachey, ‘The Claims of Patriotism’, War and Peace, cited in Holroyd, Strachey, p. 341. 49 BL,MC, Add MSS 60711.7, J. Strachey to L. Strachey, 24 Feb. 1916. 50 ‘With the war, the supreme importance of international questions has been forced upon my attention. My opinions have for many years been strongly critical of the whole structure of society; and after a study of the diplomatic situation, and of the literature, both controversial and philosophic, arising out of the war, they developed naturally into those I now hold’. Cited in Holroyd, Strachey, p. 340. 51 BL,MC, Add MSS 60711.20, J. Strachey to L. Strachey, 1 March 1916. 52 BL,MC, Add MSS 60711.66, L. Strachey to J. Strachey; draft statement for appeal, undated. 53 BL,MC, Add MSS 71104.86, L. Strachey to Clive Bell, 20 Oct. 1917. 54 BL,MC, Add MSS 62888, L. Strachey to Carrington, 23 March 1917. 55 L. Strachey to Ottoline Morrell, 3 March 1918, cited in Holroyd, Strachey, pp. 411–12. 56 BL,MC, Add MSS 62889, L. Strachey to Dora Carrington, 9 July 1918. 57 L. Stachey to Ottoline Morrell, 16 Feb. 1916, cited in Holroyd, Strachey, p. 345. 58 BL,MC, Add MSS 59732.256, L. Strachey to Duncan Grant, 22 May 1918. 59 Grant had accompanied Garnett to France at the end of the latter’s leave in November 1915, but had only got as far as Dieppe, where he aroused suspicion by being out of uniform and gave unsatisfactory answers when questioned: ‘His manner was so strange and sentiments so unEnglish’, as H.C. Wallis, the British Vice Consul in Dieppe described the circumstances of Grant’s deportation later to Grant’s aunt. Cited in Frances Spalding, Duncan Grant (Lon- don, 1997), p. 179. 60 BL,MC, Add MSS 6066.8788, David Garnett to L. Strachey, 6 Nov. 1915. 61 David Garnett, Great Friends (London, 1979), p. 134. 62 Leonard Woolf, Beginning Again (London, 1964), p. 177. 63 David Garnett, Flowers of the Forest (London, 1955), p. 123. 64 BL,MC, Add MSS 60659.199–200, Vanessa Bell to L. Strachey, 27 April [1916]. 65 BL,MC, Add MSS 57933.122, D. Grant to L. Strachey [8 Sept. 1914]. 66 BL,MC, Add MSS 59732.253, L. Strachey to D. Grant, undated. 67 BL,MC, Add MSS 57933.136, D. Grant to L. Strachey, 20 May 1918. 68 TGA,CTP, 8010.5.5, Clive Bell to Vanessa Bell, undated [Spring 1916]. 69 TGA,CTP, 8010.5.12, C. Bell to V. Bell, [Spring 1916]. During the course of the conflict Bell breakfasted with Lloyd George and wrote a memorandum on the treatment of conscientious objectors for Asquith. Although Bell did not attain Keynes’ heights of influence, his move- ments were viewed with suspicion in some quarters, not least by his own friends. Lytton Strachey reported to his brother in May 1916 that although Bertrand Russell and Clifford Allen (with Allen, at least, the ‘recognized’ side of conscientious objection) supported Bell in his views, they ‘did not want it to be supposed that he [Bell] represented anything’, – the anti-

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war MP Philip Morrell having to explain this to Gilbert Murray, the sympathetic Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford. BL,MC, Add MSS 60711.41, L. Strachey to J. Strachey, 6 May 1916. 70 Clive Bell, Peace at Once, (London, 1915), p. 40. 71 Clive Bell, Civilization and Old Friends (Chicago, 1973), pp. 101, 158. Civilization origi- nally published London, 1928. 72 TGA,CTP, 8010.5.9, C. Bell to V. Bell (Spring 1916). 73 BL,MC, Add MSS 60660.59, Francis Birrell to L. Strachey, 24 Sept. [1915]. 74 BL,MC, Add MSS 60660.64, F. Birrell to L. Strachey, 1 March 1916. 75 Forster to his mother, 10 July 1916, cited in P.N. Furbank, E.M. Forster – A Life, Volume Two (London, 1978), p. 27. 76 Forster to Malcolm Darling, 6 Nov. 1914, Selected Letters of E.M. Forster, Volume One, ed. Mary Lago and P.N. Furbank (London 1983), no. 136, p. 214. 77 Forster, Diary, Aug. 1914, cited in P.N. Furbank, E.M. Forster – A Life, Volume One (Lon- don, 1977), p. 259. 78 Ibid., Diary entry, 3 Aug. 1914, p. 259. 79 Ibid., p. 259. 80 E.M. Forster to S.R. Masood, 8 Sep. 1917, Selected Letters, ed. Lago and Furbank, no. 175, p. 269. 81 E.M. Forster to F. Barger, 23 March 1918, Selected Letters, ed. Lago and Furbank, no. 187, p. 288. 82 E.M. Forster to Siegfried Sassoon, 2 May 1918, Selected Letters, ed. Lago and Furbank, no. 188, p. 289. 83 E.M. Forster, Diary, 4 Aug. 1914, cited in Furbank, Forster – A Life, Volume One, p. 259. 84 E.M. Forster to Malcolm Darling, 6 Nov. 1914, Selected Letters, ed. Lago and Furbank, no. 136, p. 214. 85 E.M. Forster to Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, 5 May 1917, Selected Letters, ed. Lago and Furbank, no. 165, pp. 251–3. 86 Hermoine Lee, Virginia Woolf (London, 1996), p. 341. 87 The Essays of Virginia Woolf – Volume Two, ed. Andrew McNellie (London, 1986), March 1917, p. 87. 88 James King, Virginia Woolf (London, 1994), p. 285. 89 Virginia Woolf to Ka Cox, 19 March 1916, ‘The Question of Things Happening’ – The Letters of Virginia Woolf – Volume Two, 1912 –1922, ed. Nigel Nicholson (London, 1976), no. 746, p. 83. 90 TGA,CTP 8010.8.135, Vanessa Bell to Roger Fry, Aug. 1914. 91 TGA, CTP 8010.2.149, V. Bell to R. Fry, 17 June 1915. 92 TGA, CTP 8010.8.137, V. Bell to R. Fry, 25 Aug. 1914. 93 TGA, CTP 8010.8.166, V. Bell to R. Fry, 21 May 1915. 94 Frances Spalding, Vanessa Bell (London, 1983), p. 149. 95 TGA, CTP 8010.8.192, V. Bell to R. Fry, 1 Jan. 1916. 96 Despite testimonies from Philip Morrell, Vanessa Bell’s brother Adrian Stephen and J.M. Keynes, the appeal of Grant and Garnett was rejected, with Vanessa Bell viewing the occa- sion as a ‘complete farce’ and commenting that the authorities had been ‘so stupid that it was quite hopeless from the beginning and nothing made any impression on them’ – even Keynes’ dramatic revelation that Garnett’s mother, Constance, who had been the translator of Tolstoy had elicited no response from the tribunal panel. Bell fully expected the two men to be sent to prison and her only hope was that they would be released as soon as possible. ‘One’s hopes go up and down’, she wrote, ‘and I expect it would be best, if one could, to take things as they come and not look ahead’. Further anxious days were spent waiting to hear the decision of the Central Tribunal regarding alternative employment, after the Appeal Tribu- nal at Ipswich had exempted both men from active service. This uncertainty occasioned an

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appeal, made by Virginia Woolf but prompted by her sister, to Lady Robert Cecil on behalf of the two conscientious objectors. Bell feared that a delay in the decision-making process could mean that a new scheme for objectors was in preparation – one which would involve some kind of organised work which could mean, to Bell’s intense concern, that ‘they [Grant and Garnett] wouldn’t be allowed to go on here’ (i.e. continue with their normal lives – painting, in Grant’s case). 97 TGA, CTP 8010.8.203, 8010.8.208, 8010.8.209, V. Bell to R. Fry, 22 June 1916; then un- dated (July/August 1916). 98 TGA, CTP 8010.8.266, V. Bell to R. Fry, 12 April 1918. 99 TGA, CTP 8010.8.277, V. Bell to R. Fry, 11 Nov. 1918. 100 V. Woolf to Ka Cox, 12 Aug. 1914, Question of Things Happening ed. Nicholson, no. 709, p. 51. 101 Ibid., V. Woolf to Duncan Grant, no. 736, 15 Nov. 1915, p. 71. 102 Ibid., V. Woolf to Margaret Llewlyn Davies, No. 740, 23 Jan. 1916, p. 76. 103 Ibid., V. Woolf to Lady Robert Cecil, no. 767, 16 Jun. 1916, p. 100. 104 The Diary of Virginia Woolf, ed. Bell, 27 Aug. 1918, p. 186. 105 Ibid., 15 Nov. 1918, p. 217. 106 Ibid., 19 Nov. 1917, p. 79. 107 Mary Agnes Hamilton, Remembering My Good Friends (London, 1944), pp. 74, 76. 108 McM,BRP 710.082299, Lady Ottoline to Bertrand Russell, 31 July 1914. 109 Ottoline Morrell, 9 Aug. 1914, cited in The Early Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell, ed. R. Gathorne-Hardy (London, 1963), p. 262. 110 McM,BRP 710.082345, Lady Ottoline to B. Russell, 14 Oct. 1914. 111 Ottoline at Garsington – Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell 1915–1918, ed. R. Gathorne Hardy (London, 1974), pp. 31, 162. 112 Ottoline Morrell, Journal, cited in Ottoline at Garsington, ed. Gathorne-Hardy, p. 35. 113 Siegfried Sassoon, Siegfried’s Journey (London, 1946), p. 23. 114 McM,BRP 710.082633, Lady Ottoline to B. Russell, 15 June 1917. 115 McM,BRP 710.082636, Lady Ottoline to B. Russell, 9 July 1917. 116 Ottoline Morrell, Journal, Jan. 1918, cited in Ottoline at Garsington, ed. Gathorne-Hardy, p. 233. 117 McM,BRP 710.082681, Lady Ottoline to B. Russell, 2 Sept. 1918. 118 Ottoline Morrell, Journal, cited in Ottoline at Garsington, ed. Gathorne-Hardy, pp. 83–4. 119 Frances Partridge, letter to J.P. Atkin, 18 Nov. 1994. 120 Interview between Frances Partridge and J.P. Atkin, 18 Jan. 1995. 121 Ibid. 122 J.M. Keynes, Two Memoirs (London, 1949), pp. 97–8.

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